Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (17 page)

Twice that day he thought he felt her brush at his mind, the faintest of
gossamer touches, but there were too many distractions—he couldn't
concentrate enough. As he washed up after work, he felt the touch again: a
hesitant, delicate, exploratory touch, as if someone were groping through
his mind with feather fingers.

Mason trembled, and his eyes glazed. He stood, head tilted, unaware of the
stream of hot water against his back and hips, the wet stone underfoot,
the beaded metal walls; the soap drying on his arms and chest, the smell
of heat and wet flesh, the sharp hiss of the shower jets and the gargle of
water down the drain; the slap of thongs and rasp of towels, the jumbled
crisscross of wet footprints left by men moving from the showers to the
lockers, the stuffiness of steam and sweat disturbed by an eddy of colder
air as someone opened the outer door; the rows of metal lockers beyond the
showers with
Playboy
gatefolds and Tijuana pornography and family
snapshots pinned to the doors, the discolored wooden benches and the boxes
of foot powder, the green and white walls of the dressing room covered
with company bulletins and joke-shop signs … Everything that went
into the making of that moment, of his reality, of his life. It all faded,
became a ghost, the shadow of a shadow, disappeared completely, did not
exist. There was only here, and Lilith here. And their touch, infinitely
closer than joined fingers. Then the world dragged him away.

He opened his eyes. Reality came back: in a babble, in a rush, mildly
nauseating. He ignored it, dazed and incandescent with the promise of the
night ahead. The world steadied. He stepped back into the shower stream to
wash the soap from his body. He had an enormous erection. Clumsily, he
tried to hide it with a towel.

Mason takes a taxi home from work. The first time.

That night he is transformed, ripped out of himself, turned inside out. It
is pleasure so intense that, like pain, it cannot be remembered clearly
afterward—only recollected as a severe shock: sensation translated
into a burst of fierce white light. It is pleasure completely beyond his
conception—his most extreme fantasy not only fulfilled but
intensified. And yet for all the intensity of feeling, it is a gentle
thing, a knowing, a complete sharing of emotion, a transcendental empathy.
And afterward there is only peace: a silence deeper than death, but not
alone. I love you, he tells her, really believing it for the first time
with anyone, realizing that words have no meaning, but knowing that she
will understand, I love you.

When he woke up in the morning, he knew that this would be the day.

Today she would come. The certainty pulsed through him, he breathed it
like air, it beat in his blood. The knowledge of it oozed in through every
pore, only to meet the same knowledge seeping out. It was something felt
on a cellular level, a biological assurance. Today they would be together.

He looked at the ceiling. It was pocked with water stains; a deep crack
zigzagged across flaking plaster. It was beautiful. He watched it for a
half hour without moving, without being aware of the passage of time;
without being aware that what he was watching was a "ceiling." Then,
sluggishly, something came together in his head, and he recognized it.
Today he didn't begrudge it, as he had Wednesday morning. It was a
transient condition. It was of no more intrinsic importance than the wall
of a butterfly's cocoon after metamorphosis.

Mason rolled to his feet. Fatigue and age had vanished. He was filled with
bristly, crackling vitality, every organ, every cell seeming to work at
maximum efficiency: so healthy that "healthy" became an inadequate word.
This was a newer, higher state.

Mason accepted it calmly, without question. His movements were leisurely
and deliberate, almost slow motion, as if he were swimming through syrup.
He knew where he was going, that they would find each other today—that
was predestined. He was in no hurry. The same inevitability colored his
thoughts. There was no need to do much thinking now, it was all arranged.
His mind was nearly blank, only deep currents running. Her nearness
dazzled him. Walking, he dreamed of her, of time past, of time to come.

He drifted to the window, lazily admiring the prism sprays sunlight made
around the edges of the glass. The streets outside were empty, hushed as a
cathedral. Not even birds to break the holy silence. Papers dervished down
the center of the road. The sun was just floating clear of the brick
horizon: a bloated red ball, still hazed with nearness to the earth.

He stared at the sun.

Mason became aware of his surroundings again while he was dressing. Dimly,
he realized that he was buckling his belt, slipping his feet into shoes,
tying knots in the shoelaces. His attention was caught by a crisscross
pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen wall.

He was standing in front of the slaughterhouse. Mason blinked at the
building's filigreed iron gates. Somewhere in there, he must have caught
the bus and ridden it to work. He couldn't remember. He didn't care.

Walking down a corridor. A machine booms far away.

He was in an elevator. People. Going down.

Time clock.

A door. The dressing room, deep in the plant. Mason hesitated. Should he
go to work today? With Lilith so close? It didn't matter—when she
came, Lilith would find him no matter where he was. It was easier
meanwhile not to fight his body's trained responses; much easier to just
go along with them, let them carry him where they would, do what they
wanted him to do.

Buttoning his work uniform. He didn't remember opening the door, or the
locker. He told himself that he'd have to watch that.

A montage of surprised faces, bobbing like balloons, very far away. Mason
brushed by without looking at them. Their lips moved as he passed, but he
could not hear their words.

Don't look back. They can turn you to salt, all the hollow men.

The hammer was solid and heavy in his hand. Its familiar weight helped to
clear his head, to anchor him to the world. Mason moved forward more
quickly. A surviving fragment of his former personality was eager to get
to work, to demonstrate his regained strength and vigor for the other men.
He felt the emotion through an ocean of glass, like ghost pain in an
amputated limb. He tolerated it, humored it; after today, it wouldn't
matter.

Mason walked to the far end of the long white room. Lilith seemed very
close now—her nearness made his head buzz intolerably. He stumbled
ahead, walking jerkily, as if he were forcing his way against waves of
pressure. She would arrive any second. He could not imagine how she would
come, or from where. He could not imagine what would happen to him, to
them. He tried to visualize her arrival, but his mind, having only Disney,
sci-fi, and religion to work with, could only picture an ethereally
beautiful woman made of stained glass descending from the sky in a column
of golden light while organ music roared: the light shining all around her
and from her, spraying into unknown colors as it passed through her clear
body. He wasn't sure if she would have wings.

Raw daylight through the open end of the room. The nervous lowing of
cattle. Smell of dung and sweat, undertang of old, lingering blood. The
other men, looking curiously at him. They had masks for faces, viper eyes.
Viper eyes followed him through the room. Hooves scuffed gravel outside.

Heavy-lidded, trembling, he took his place.

They herded in the first cow of the day, straight up to Mason. He lifted
the hammer.

The cow approached calmly. Tranquilly she walked before the prods, her
head high. She stared intently at Mason. Her eyes were wide and deep—serene,
beautiful, and trusting.

Lilith, he named her, and then the hammer crashed home between her eyes.

The End

© 1972 by Gardner Dozois. First published in
Orbit 10,
ed.
Damon Knight, GP Putnam's 1972.

John Varley

There was a bomb on the Leystrasse, level forty-five, right outside the
Bagatelle Flower and Gift Shoppe, about a hundred meters down the
promenade from Prosperity Plaza.

"I am a bomb," the bomb said to passersby. "I will explode in four hours,
five minutes, and seventeen seconds. I have a force equal to fifty
thousand English tons of trinitrololuene."

A small knot of people gathered to look at it.

"I will go off in four hours, four minutes, and thirty-seven seconds."

A few people became worried as the bomb talked on. They remembered
business elsewhere and hurried away, often toward the tube trains to King
City. Eventually, the trains became overcrowded and there was some pushing
and shoving.

The bomb was a metal cylinder, a meter high, two meters long, mounted on
four steerable wheels. There was an array of four television cameras
mounted on top of the cylinder, slowly scanning through ninety degrees. No
one could recall how it came to be there. It looked a little like the
municipal street-cleaning machines; perhaps no one had noticed it because
of that.

"I am rated at fifty kilotons," the bomb said, with a trace of pride.

The police were called.

"A
nuclear
bomb, you say?" Municipal Police Chief Anna-Louise Bach
felt sourness in the pit of her stomach and reached for a box of medicated
candy. She was overdue for a new stomach, but the rate she went through
them on her job, coupled with the size of her paycheck, had caused her to
rely more and more on these stopgap measures. And the cost of cloned
transplants was going up.

"It says fifty kilotons," said the man on the screen. "I don't see what
else it could be. Unless it's just faking, of course. We're moving in
radiation detectors."

"You said 'it says.' Are you speaking of a note, or phone call, or what?"

"No. It's talking to us. Seems friendly enough, too, but we haven't gotten
around to asking it to disarm itself. It could be that its friendliness
won't extend that far."

"No doubt." She ate another candy. "Call in the bomb squad, of course.
Then tell them to do nothing until I arrive, other than look the situation
over. I'm going to make a few calls, then I'll be there. No more than
thirty minutes."

"All right. Will do."

There was nothing for it but to look for help. No nuclear bomb had ever
been used on Luna. Bach had no experience with them, nor did her bomb
crew. She brought her computer on line.

Roger Birkson liked his job. It wasn't so much the working conditions—which
were appalling—but the fringe benefits. He was on call for thirty
days, twenty-four hours a day, at a salary that was nearly astronomical.
Then he got eleven months' paid vacation. He was paid for the entire year
whether or not he ever had to exercise his special talents during his
thirty days' duty. In that way, he was like a firefighter. In a way, he
was
a firefighter.

He spent his long vacations in Luna. No one had ever asked Birkson why he
did so; had they asked, he would not have known. But the reason was a
subconscious conviction that one day the entire planet Earth would blow up
in one glorious fireball. He didn't want to be there when it happened.

Birkson's job was bomb disarming for the geopolitical administrative unit
called CommEcon Europe. On a busy shift he might save the lives of twenty
million CE Europeans.

Of the thirty-five Terran bomb experts vacationing on Luna at the time of
the Leystrasse bomb scare, Birkson happened to be closest to the projected
epicenter of the blast. The Central Computer found him twenty-five seconds
after Chief Bach rang off from her initial report. He was lining up a putt
on the seventeenth green of the Burning Tree underground golf course, a
half kilometer from Prosperity Plaza, when his bag of clubs began to ring.

Birkson was wealthy. He employed a human caddy instead of the mechanical
sort. The caddy dropped the flag he had been holding and went to answer
it. Birkson took a few practice swings but found that his concentration
had been broken. He relaxed and took the call.

"I need your advice," Bach said, without preamble. "I'm the Chief of
Municipal Police for New Dresden, Anna-Louise Bach. I've had a report on a
nuclear bomb on the Leystrasse, and I don't have anyone with your
experience in these matters. Could you meet me at the tube station in ten
minutes?"

"Are you crazy? I'm shooting for a seventy-five with two holes to go, an
easy three-footer on seventeen and facing a par five on the last hole, and
you expect me to go chasing after a hoax?"

"Do you know it to be a hoax?" Bach asked, wishing he would say yes.

"Well, no, I just now heard about it, myself. But ninety percent of them
are, you know."

"Fine. I suggest you continue your game. And since you're so sure, I'm
going to have Burning Tree sealed off for the duration of the emergency. I
want you right there."

Birkson considered this.

"About how far away is this 'Leystrasse'?"

"About six hundred meters. Five levels up from you, and one sector over.
Don't worry. There must be dozens of steel plates between you and the
hoax. You just sit tight, all right?"

Birkson said nothing.

"I'll be at the tube station in ten minutes," Bach said. "I'll be in a
special capsule. It'll be the last one for five hours." She hung up.

Birkson contemplated the wall of the underground enclosure. Then he knelt
on the green and lined up his putt. He addressed the ball, tapped it, and
heard the satisfying rattle as it sank into the cup.

He looked longingly at the eighteenth tee, then jogged off to the
clubhouse.

"I'll be right back," he called over his shoulder.

Bach's capsule was two minutes late, but she had to wait another minute
for Birkson to show up. She fumed, trying not to glance at the timepiece
embedded in her wrist.